Colombia Cease-Fire Fails to End Killings - Gov't

By Phil Stewart

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombian paramilitary groups have killed more than 250 people and carried out more than a dozen massacres since declaring a cease-fire a year ago to start peace talks, the government reported on Thursday.

Chief government peace negotiator Luis Carlos Restrepo, seeking to prevent further breaches, recommended that the government quickly define "concentration areas" where the outlawed paramilitary gunmen could be assembled and monitored.

The concept of the areas was agreed last year but they have not been identified.

The cease-fire declared in December 2002 paved the way for the agreement last year for the demobilization of 20,000 outlawed gunmen by 2005. The gunmen target Marxist rebels fighting in a 4-decade-old guerrilla war.

Paramilitary leaders have been pressuring the government for amnesties that would keep them out of jail and assure that full compliance with the cease-fire will come once militias are settled in concentration areas.

"The chief peace envoy has made it known (to the paramilitary militias) that the cease-fire must be obeyed in its totality," Restrepo said in a report.

"The groups should advance immediately to their concentration areas to facilitate the compliance and verification of the cease-fire," it said.

The report, prepared by Restrepo's office, stressed that overall paramilitary killings had fallen by 44 percent from the previous year. The number of massacres was down by about half.

Still, the statistics were sure to provide fresh ammunition for critics of the negotiations with the outlawed militias, which have had ties with sectors of the Colombian military and are branded "terrorists" by Washington.

Paramilitary bosses are wanted in the United States for cocaine trafficking, and in Colombia for political assassinations and rights violations.

President Alvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by Marxist guerrillas more than a decade ago, has not publicly commented on the cease-fire breaches.

But over the past month, U.S. Ambassador William Wood, local U.N. rights official Michael Fruhling and Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos have all complained of continued far-right violence.

The Organization of American States, led by former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, has started monitoring the peace process, including the first 874 paramilitary fighters who laid down their weapons in a televised ceremony in the city of Medellin last November.

Restrepo's report stressed that the city's homicide rate had fallen 52 percent in January 2004, compared with the same month of 2003, due to the paramilitary demobilization.